Titan falls: Blizzard puts an end to MMO game Project Titan after seven years of work

Developer firm Blizzard just put Titan on a block of ice, permanently.

According to Polygon, which interviewed Mike Morhaime, the cofounder and CEO of Blizzard, one of Blizzard's most ambitious projects to date has just been killed. The company never officially announced the massively-multiplayer online game, though it repeatedly teased something was in the works. And now it looks like fans who were patiently waiting will never get a chance to see the 7 years of labor that was apparently put into Titan, also codenamed Project Titan.

"We didn't find the fun," explained Morhaime, in an attempt to justify why Blizzard shelved Titan. "We didn't find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that's the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no."

Chris Metzen, Blizzard's senior vice president of story and franchise development, said the Blizzard team had to reassess "why the hell" they were doing Titan in the first place and dscribed the decision to cancel the game as "excruciating", to which Morhaime added: "It's always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work."

Blizzard, which is currently a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, has a history of not setting release dates, choosing instead to take as much time as needed. Some of the company's most popular games include Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, StarCraft, the Diablo series, and the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Going forward, Morhaime stressed his company doesn't want to be defined by a particular genre, such as MMO, and that it wants to create great games in different genres.

One of Blizzard's latest efforts, called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, isn’t an MMO or a dungeon-crawling RPG. It is a free-to-play game that launched earlier this year, and it might signal what we could expect from Blizzard in the future.